The New Lifetime Reading Plan

He hated science, conventional Christianity, the worship of reason, progress, the interfering state, planned "respectable" living, and the idolization of money and the machine. It is easy to understand therefore why he was forced to live, though bravely and even joyfully, a life of poverty, struggle, and defi- ance. Aldous Huxley [117], who knew him well, described him as "a being, somehow, of another order." It does at times seem that he drew his energy from some primai source most of us cannot tap. In this respect as in others he reminds us of the prophet-poet Blake [63].

His books are not constructed, as Conrad's are [100]. They flow, eddy, flash, erupt, or sing in accordance with the electric changes in the authors own personality as he composed. Unless you are willing temporarily to accept this personality, his books may seem intolerable.

But Lawrence wants you to do more. His view of the novel was deeply moral. The novel, he passionately believed, "can help you not to be a dead man in life." He wants nothing less than to change you, to reawaken in you an intensity, a joy in life that he felt humanity was losing or had lost.

It is hard to say whether a century from now Lawrence will be thought of as a major prophet (as well as a remarkable artist) or merely as an oddity of genius.

The careful reader of the above paragraphs will suspect that I do not really like Lawrence as a human being and that I am doing my best to disguise my feelings. This new edition gives me an opportunity to be more honest. There was a fascist streak in Lawrence and we cannot really tell how wide it was. He once wrote: "The great mass of the population should never be taught to read and write. Never." As I have elsewhere noted, this is "one of the most remarkable statements ever made by a man who lived largely on his royalties." It is also worth remembering that, as the son of a poor miner, Lawrence was himself born into "the great mass." Had it not been for his country's enlightened universal education, he might never have become D.H. Lawrence. Never.

It has taken us some time to acknowledge that Wagner was both a genius and a swine. Of the genius Lawrence we may say, at the very least, that his character included some unpleas- ing traits.

C.F.

114

TANIZAKI JUNICHIRO

1886-1965

The Makioka Sisters

Tanizaki was born only two decades after Natsume Soseki [104], but he clearly belongs to another generation, walking confidently on the modernist path blazed so arduously by Natsume and other Meiji Period intellectuals. He was born into a prosperous Tokyo merchant family at a time when Japan's commercial prospects were booming, and grew up feeling quite comfortable with the modern, highly Westernized urban envi- ronment of Tokyo at the turn of the century.

Tanizaki attended Tokyo Imperial University but was expelled for nonpayment of fees before graduating—an act of rebellion, one supposes, since he was not short of funds. He began to publish short stories while he was in his early twen- ties; "The Tattooist" (1910) first brought him to the attention of Japan's literary world. He became infatuated with Western literature and material culture, and this is reflected in his early stories and film scripts.

In 1923, however, TanizakTs life underwent a radical change, which in turn affected his point of view. He was living in the fashionable foreign enclave of Yokoyama at the time of the great Kanto earthquake of 1923; when his house, along with thousands of others, was leveled by the quake, he aban- doned his wife and child and moved forthwith to Osaka, a much more conservative commercial city in western Japan. There he became an ardent Osaka patriot (as if a New Yorker were to move to Chicago and become a confirmed booster of the Second City), and was increasingly intrigued by the cul­tural tensions in the lives of modern Japanese of his day, peo­ple caught (like Tanizaki himself) between the fads, fashions and material allure of the West and a nostalgia for traditional Japanese culture. His first truly major novel, Some Prefer Nettles (1928), is a tale of a marriage that is unable to survive the tensions between the traditional and the modern.

I suggest that you begin your reading of Tanizaki with his finest and most famous novel, The Makioka Sisters (written 1942-44, published 1946-48). It cannot be described as auto- biographical, though some of the main characters are based on his third wife and members of her family, and the setting of the novel, in Osaka in the mid-ig30s, in some respects mirrors the actualities of TanizakTs own situation there. It is a work of the imagination, and in it Tanizaki succeeds in creating an exceptionally vivid portrait of a wealthy family^ struggles to reconcile their privileged and leisurely way of life with the harsher realities of modern times.